Sex and drugs? Real rock rebels are into tax-efficient accountancy abuse
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Version 0 of 1. Last week it was confirmed that Gary Barlow, Mark Owen and Howard "the duck" Donald, the key talents of legendary rock'n'rollers Take That, hid £63m in the Icebreaker tax avoidance scheme. Barlow's crime may cause short-lived shame, but it could guarantee the Take That frontispiece an eternal place in the rock'n'roll annals that his music (a regular presence on David Cameron's Spotify account) might not. Sid Vicious, Pete Doherty and Screaming Lord Sutch can step down. Gary Barlow is now the most offensive rock'n'roller of all! Rock'n'roll has always given young people the means to offend the petty sensibilities of society, from Elvis Presley's lascivious legs and Freddie Garrity's cruel dances, via the furious bile of punk rock'n'rollers the Jags, Bad Manners and the Pork Dukes, to the sexual explosives of Bucks Fizz's Eurovision thighs, Miley Cyrus's plucked chicken wrecking-ball lick, and Dennis Roussos's diaphanous sack. But for me, and many other part-time pop cultural critics, rock'n'roll as an art form of offence appeared to have reached its apogee in the work of the late GG Allin. Allin delighted the American hardcore rock'n'roll scene of the late 80s and early 90s by performing naked, having swallowed vast amounts of laxatives, before bellowing violently misanthropic lyrics, maiming himself, defecating on stage, throwing his excrement into the crowd, and inflicting often actionable degrees of physical damage on audience members. But at heart, Allin was still an entertainer, pledged to put on a good show for the paying public, no different to TV's Dara O'Briain or world war two's Dame Vera Lynn. Though he had always promised to commit suicide during a show, a defeated Allin finally walked off stage in Manhattan in June 1993, sporting just soiled briefs, his body smeared with blood and droppings, and into a fatal heroin overdose. Gary Barlow, in contrast, performed before the Queen at her Diamond Jubilee concert wearing a scrupulously clean thong, received an OBE for his services to charity in 2012, and once climbed Kilimanjaro with Fearne Cotton for Comic Relief, the latter an image more disturbing than anything a Google of Allin will throw up. But, to paraphrase an old vaudeville act, who is the real sick man? Is it GG Allin, singing Bite It You Scum in dirty knickers, beating himself over the head with the microphone until his skull bleeds, masturbating furiously, and kicking audience members in the teeth? Or is it Gary Barlow of Take That, in his suit and tie, conscientiously following his accountant's advice to invest in a tax avoidance scheme, while soliciting other people's money for charity and denying the most vulnerable members of society the benefit of his personal financial contribution? It is Gary Barlow. Obviously. In Hated, a documentary about his former employer, GG Allin's drummer, Donald "Dino Sex" Sachs, suggests Allin's scatological, sadomasochistic performances had some satirical purpose, or were a form of social commentary; that Allin intended to compare his own zany plop antics with "a society that's going crazy with violence". I wish that were true, though I'm not sure Allin's posthumous body of work has the rigorous theoretical scaffolding required to sustain a consistent ideological or aesthetic position. That said, there doesn't seem to have been much difference between Allin's private faces and his public faeces. Gary Barlow is a far more complex character than GG Allin, despite also choosing to place his artworks within the broad field of light entertainment. Though convicted of an appallingly violent assault in 1989, Allin was nonetheless a kind of punk bouffon, and one that the clown guru Philippe Gaulier would have recognised, inviting us to hate him, self-consciously taking on the mantle of the folk devil. In contrast to Allin, Gary Barlow accepted an OBE publicly for his good works, despite privately playing his part in closing hospitals, schools, shelters, and women's refuges across the land. Allin's life was a performance. Barlow's life is an act. The paper trail linking Gary Barlow to a homeless man expiring in an empty building is convoluted. Allin's culpability follows a more obvious sequence of cause and effect. He ate laxatives. This caused him to soil himself. He then threw his filth around, and if it hit you in the face you might get an illness. But compared with Barlow's tax avoidance, Allin's actions seem simple, uncontrived, honest – noble, even. His onstage offences were transient, as ephemeral as the sudden impact of a ball of dung in the eye. But who knows at what age Barlow began planning to present the public face of a charitable do-gooder, while secretly scheming to deprive the weak and vulnerable of succour, if indeed he ever did so? To quote Karlheinz Stockhausen's oft-misunderstood comments on the 9/11 atrocity, Barlow's career might be the devil's "greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos". Allin aimed to be the ultimate rock'n'roll degenerate, but as an icon of filth, Barlow has surpassed him. To be charitable to Barlow, we might perhaps see the same sort of satirical purpose in songs like "Back For Good", "Shine" and the other ones, all of which now taste of ashes and earwax, that defenders of GG Allin attribute to songs like "Kiss Me In The Gutter" and "Suck My Ass It Smells". In creating this "Gary Barlow" character, who raises money for charity while simultaneously trampling our shared values into the urinal trough, was Barlow in fact (like the comedy of Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais at its best) holding up a mirror to society, magnifying our hypocrisy through the lens of his own actions? Who can say? But the fact remains, today's young people, anxious to offend as ever, need to embrace the opportunity Barlow has offered them to discover an avatar of offence that is entirely appropriate to our corrupt era. Grubby T-shirts of Vicious and Cobain and Doherty all seem so 20th century. In the current climate of cuts and austerity, drugs and violence are silly schoolyard crimes compared with massive corporate and individual tax avoidance. In 1976, Vivienne Westwood made T-shirts of a violent masked criminal. Couldn't some enterprising young fashion designer today employ Barlow's Cameron-endorsed visage as a similar cipher for off-the-peg prêt-a-porter moral transgression? How brilliantly and thrillingly offensive would it be for today's teens to parade around in T-shirts bearing the smiling face of Gary Barlow, OBE? Stewart Lee is appearing free for charity at standup comedy benefits almost weekly for the rest of the year, as usual. See stewartlee.co.uk for details |